The Worcester Public Schools Strategic Planning Task Force will announce a strategic planning initiative Friday, June 16.

Thinking of attending the March 7 City Council meeting at 7 p.m. at City Hall? Here’s a look at some of the more eye-catching items on the agenda. The full document is here. This week is a City Council Agenda.

The homeowners appear to be gaining power, as for the second year in a row, the City Council shifted responsibility for the city’s property tax fulfillment to businesses – this time with a wider margin of victory. The impact for everyone will be lessened, though, by a budget maneuver that will alter previously conservative projections from another revenue stream, saving the city’s taxpayers, collectively, nearly a half-million dollars this year.

The Worcester Regional Research Bureau has weighed in on a budget maneuver that would save taxpayers money this year by increasing the optimism of revenue estimates, saying “past performance is not an indicator of future success” and urging caution when assuming local receipts will continue to remain high.

Is Worcester’s business community in a tailspin, with companies abandoning the city in droves for greener pastures? Or is that something people only bring up once a year to try to get a better commercial tax rate? And do tax rates have to go up at all? All those questions and more were left unanswered by the City Council when they requested numbers for an alternate way to meet the city’s revenue needs and pushed a tax classification vote off by a week.

The Worcester Regional Research Bureau is urging the city to create a dedicated Parking Division following the release of a report that concludes the available downtown parking’s “location, condition, and design limit its ability to support an aggressive economic development agenda,” and that its “position within City government—well down the hierarchical food chain—limits its ability to compete for attention and resources and adapt to new technologies that are improving the relationship between parking and cities globally.”

Earlier this year the Worcester Regional Research Bureau recommended a pilot program to establish Neighborhood Councils to boost city’s abysmal voter turnout and encourage civic engagement.

2 minute opening from each candidate. There will be 90 seconds to answer per question, 60 seconds for four candidates to respond, 30 seconds for original candidate to rebut.

There will be 15 questions total, 5 to each candidate, based on drawing names from a hat, with comment opportunities on each question.

Believing school safety has become a giant concern, Nick D’Andrea, a first-time candidate for School Committee, has launched a petition demanding swift action from Worcester Public Schools Superintendent Melinda Boone.